


Breathless Trains and Worn Down Glories

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Post-S1, get ginny out of the hotel 2k17, valentine's day fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-23 18:58:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9671759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: post-S1, Mike pays a visit to Ginny’s new place. Valentine’s Day exchange gift for maybetwice.“I gotta admit, rook, glad as I am to still be a Padre, I've found myself wondering what might have happened if Oscar had called just like, five minutes later.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maybetwice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/gifts).



[Valentine’s Day exchange](https://pitchsecretadmirers.tumblr.com/) gift for [maybetwice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoinautumn/pseuds/maybetwice). 

Title from “[We Don’t Eat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR3HRMO7nZg)” by James Vincent McMorrow.

 

**Breathless Trains and Worn Down Glories**

He shows up 40 minutes late, of course he does. Not that it really makes a difference either way, Ginny’s sullen subconscious reminds her. She’s been in a bad mood since the movers showed up at her doorstep hours ago, and she tries in vain to ignore the part of her that's genuinely buoyed by the sight of Mike Lawson on her new front stoop.

“Party’s cancelled,” she snaps, in spite of herself. “Did you not get the Facebook message?” As the words leave her mouth, before the confused frown even has a chance to wrinkle Mike’s face, she realizes her mistake.

“Of course you didn’t.” _Sigh_. “Check your phone once in awhile, grandpa.”

The captain’s expression twists even further in confusion, and when he glances down to palm at his jeans pocket, Ginny notices a few new streaks of grey in his beard. It’s strange, not seeing him every day in the off-season, but she'd never admit to missing him.

“I saw Blip’s car out front,” he points out, giving up on his phone almost as quickly as he started. She doubts he'd even be able to figure out which app to look at to find the now-deleted invite for what was supposed to be her housewarming party.

“Yeah well, Blip and Evy are here because I guilted them into helping--”

“Helping?” he interrupts. “What’s wrong?”

Mike looks at her, with that scrunchy, concerned face he points her way far too often, and her stupid heart does another little flip. She relaxes just a little, enough to open the door and take a step back, revealing that the entryway of her modest condo is stacked high with brown cardboard boxes.

“This is how my mother announces that she’s moving in with her boyfriend,” she sighs, again. “Or, fiance, I guess…”

“She got engaged?”

The word sounds foreign to Ginny’s ears and she realizes that some stubborn part of her brain was just refusing to put the pieces together. “She called to tell me they’re getting married,” she admits. “I guess so.”

She actually hadn't given it much thought until that moment, distracted by the U-Haul of a task at hand. She wonders if Kevin got down on one knee. She wonders if her mother cried.

“Anyway, she sent me like, half the stuff from the house so she can get it ready to put on the market.” Ginny’s eyes regain their focus and Mike’s looking right at her, almost through her, like he’s trying to figure something out. “And since all the boxes arrived today, and since I can’t really lift anything,” she motions to her immobilized arm, “it’s not really a great time for a party.”

He waits a beat before he speaks, and she expects something about how he didn’t cross the Coronado Bridge tonight just to be denied a celebratory bash. Not for the first time, he surprises her.

“Blip and Evelyn are helping, I assume.”

“Yeah.” She finally steps back enough to let him in, and he accepts the unspoken invitation. “Evy’s unpacking the kitchen stuff that I can actually use-”

“ _Could_ use, if you knew the first thing about cooking.” Evelyn materializes, poking at Ginny with a rubber spatula as Mike follows her through the front room into the kitchen, which she _loves_ , even if her friend is right about her culinary skills. “There's some nice stuff in here and I'd hate to see you use it just to burn Kraft macaroni.”

Ginny ignores her, turning back to Mike, who’s appraising the room silently. She finds herself wondering what he thinks, daring herself to ask outright. “You want a beer?”

“Sure.” He nods, and gives her another smile that makes her knees wobble just slightly. “Where's Blip?”

“Carrying the rest of the boxes up to the empty guest room,” she answers, popping open two beers and handing them both to him. “You’re welcome to help him, back permitting of course.”

Mike just rolls his eyes and heads up the stairs with the drinks. A few seconds later, she hears him and Blip bound back down to the first floor, trash-talking as they try to one-up each other in a box-carrying contest. Evelyn's focus, however, as it has been since Ginny told her about the night outside Boardner’s, is singularly honed in on Mike's arrival. Or rather, Ginny's reaction to Mike's arrival.

“So he came over, huh?” Her friend poses it like a harmless question, back turned as she sorts through a box of flatware, though it's far from an innocent inquiry.

She rolls her eyes. “Just cause he's the oldest man in the whole world and didn't get the message that the party was cancelled.”

“So he _came_ _over_ ,” Evelyn repeats with emphasis, drama practically dripping from her multiple innuendos.

“We're not doing this,” Ginny answers defiantly, her new mantra when it comes to her friend’s ceaseless questions.

Mercifully, Blip pops downstairs to ask Evy something about bathroom storage, and instead of listening, Ginny takes advantage of the distraction to escape the kitchen. Heading up the stairs and rounding the corner to the spare room, she sputters to a dead stop at the sight of Mike Lawson lining her Little League trophies up on top of one of her bookcases.

“You're opening my boxes? Seriously?”

“It was marked ‘baseball,’’ he admits with a shrug . At least he has the decency to look a little sheepish. “Figured you could put some stuff up in here, make this a display room.”

“This is a guest room and an office.” She argues because that's what they do, not because she's really bothered by it. And, if she's being honest, the baseball memorabilia makes the place feel homier than it has since she moved in two weeks ago. “I don't think we need every single participation ribbon up on the walls.”

He chuckles, digging out a few more trophies before diving into the box with both hands to pull out a tattered navy binder she remembers all too well.

It’s bigger than she remembers, and it looks heavy. Mike's biceps flex as he sets it down on the desk. Not that she’s watching Mike’s biceps. Not that she noticed when he shrugged out of his leather jacket to start unpacking her mementos, as if that's something teammates do for one another.

“Well then, what's this thing?” He cracks open the binder and Ginny shudders at the first page, a team picture from her junior year of high school.

“That’s the Ginny Baker Book,” she answers, matter-of-factly. “Stat sheets, press clippings, scouting reports, letters of recommendation. Everything you need to sell someone on Ginny Baker in twenty minutes or less.”

“Aw, it's kind of nice,” Mike muses softly, flipping through the pages. If she didn't know better, she'd say he sounds a little wistful.

Come to think of it, she doesn't know better. No one seems to know that much about the Lawson family, besides the fact that there doesn't appear to be one. Moments like these are when Ginny finds herself wondering the most.

“You parents made this?” he asks while she wonders.

“My dad used to keep this thing buckled in the backseat of his car.” That seems to break the spell, he looks up at her and laughs a little. “I'm _not_ kidding. He'd keep it updated too, so he could show off all the stats from the game of the week.”

Then it's Ginny's turn to trail off, remembering her father in that way she always does when she thinks about the baseball she's played since he was there to watch.

Perhaps sensing that she needs a distraction, Mike leaves the book on the desk, diving back into the memories and coming back up with a smaller, white box that looks like it came from a department store.

“What is this?” He pulls out the contents to dangle his fingers, and wags his eyebrows at her. “Ooh, you gonna try this on for me?”

Ginny recognizes the dress immediately, and chokes out a laugh that tastes bitter. “That's the dress my mother bought me for my first school dance”

Mike must mistake her reaction to the memory for something else, because he stammers, awkwardly offering, “C’mon, I bet you were adorable.”

“Yeah,” she fake-laughs again for just a second before deciding, without really knowing why, to tell him the truth. “No actually, I uh, I never got to wear it.”

He watches her closely, obviously expecting more to the answer. She feels lame when she adds, “Baseball stuff, you know.”

She remembers the burn of that day so clearly, even now. Running home from school, ready to quit the game entirely for the sake of a life not lived. Finding her mother wrapped up with a man who wasn't her father and deciding, right then and there that her allegiance had to belong to one side or the other. Baseball or boys, sports or romance, talent or heart. Pick one, and own that choice.

It wasn't until adulthood that she started to look back at the other side of the story, the path she could have taken. It's not until moments like this one when she thinks about her mother being left out of the shorthand existence she and her father turned into a routine: staying home alone during week-long travel team road trips and working extra hours so they could keep Ginny in new cleats and pay for a private pitching coach.

It's not until recently that she’s realized she's not the only one who was lonely.

“For a long time, I blamed my mom for that.” Ginny tells Mike, thinking back to the dance, the first of many missed. “It just made sense, I was already blaming her for everything else.”

He snorts out a humorless laugh that sounds like he's familiar with the feeling. She looks up at him and he just nods tersely before turning his attention back to smoothing the dress back into its box.

“We were so close when I was younger.” She tells him more, because having him this close to these pieces of her childhood has opened some sort of floodgate. “Then, I don't know, we just kind of gave up on each other.”

“Still, I kept her secret for all those years,” she continues, tangent devolving past the point of Mike’s understanding, but unable to stop herself, “and now I'm supposed to stand there and smile while she marries him, like it's totally normal?”

He's quiet for a long moment after her little rant and Ginny feels that specific kind of embarrassed guilt that comes when you've said more than you should have. She also finds herself trying to predict him again, despite knowing that it's an exercise in futility.

“Sometimes, all we can do for the people we love is be completely selfless.” The words grate from Mike's lips and she finds herself watching them, hoping there's a caveat coming, even if she's not entirely sure why.

“And sometimes,” he takes a step closer and it feels like the temperature in the room goes up, “we have to be selfish.”

She knows that they’re talking about her mother -- who, in hindsight, held her family together for as long as she could, despite her husband’s singular focus and in spite of her own happiness -- but Ginny wonders if there isn’t something more to it. Something that would explain the feeling in the pit of her stomach at Mike’s words, something that would explain the way he's looking at her.

He lifts a hand to cup her cheek, using his thumb to wipe away a tear she hadn't noticed falling. He's close, when Ginny looks up to meet his eyes, she wonders if he's closer now than he was that night outside the bar. Her breath hitches when she realizes that he's looking at her the same way, too. That's when she runs.

She flees back downstairs to the kitchen, where Evy's pouring another glass of wine.

“Me too, please.”

“OK, _now_ are we doing this?” Evelyn hands over her own goblet, clearly able to see something written all over her face. Ginny wishes she knew what it said.

“No... I don't know,” She answers almost to herself, mentally sorting through how she came so close to kissing Mike Lawson _again_. It may be the most she's ever wanted something she knew was terrible for her. “Things are getting a little intense.”

“Like _intense,_ intense?” Evy’s ready to pry, but when Ginny screws up her face, trying to better articulate the way she's feeling about her teammate’s physical and emotional proximity, something changes.

“Oh my god, OK, message received.” her friend flutters her hands and practically squeals, but she doesn’t explain herself. “I'm going to… We're going right now. We're gone. _Blip_?”

Evy's husband appears from around the corner, but her voice inadvertently summons Mike from upstairs at the same time.

“You guys leaving?” Ginny can feel his eyes on her as he descends the stairs, but when she finally glances back up at him, he's looking at his feet, seemingly as shell-shocked as she feels. “I guess I’ll walk out with you.”

She's the one who ran first and yet, Ginny's stomach twists at the idea he might leave. This time, she doesn't even pretend not to know why.

“Yeah, I uh... I guess I’m in good shape.” She presses her lips into a tight smile and looks everywhere but Mike’s face. “Thanks for all your help, guys.”

She hugs Blip before Evy hustles him out the door, leaving her hanging with a kiss on the cheek and a not-so-subtle punch to her good arm. And then there were two.

“So, thanks for for coming to my housewarming party,” Ginny quips because it’s easy. Jokes are good. Jokes are what they need if they're going to move from stalemate back to teammates, to return to a place where every single moment isn't fraught with this heavy kind of tension.

“Always happy to help warm a house,” he replies, like he's aware of her inner monologue. They're pretending to watch Blip and Evelyn drive away, but she wonders if Mike’s as aware of her standing next to him as she is of his presence. “Congrats rookie, it's a really nice place.”

“Season's over, Cap. I'm not your rookie anymore.”

Ginny says it almost unconsciously, but even if she had planned it, she'd never have expected him to look so… stricken? He masks it after a moment, shaking his head a little, but there's no denying what she saw. It makes her heart twist to the wrong side of painful.

“You should take a look at the rest of that scrapbook.” Mike offers finally, giving her one last look at that indecipherable smile. “Read it all the way to the end.”

It's not anywhere near what she was expecting him to say, and so it freezes her in place, long enough for him to turn and stride down her front path to the driveway. She watches him walk all the way out to the street, and it's hard to tell in the dark, but she's pretty sure he looks back at her before sliding in the driver's side door.

Ginny shuts her front door behind him with her eyebrows still furrowed and actually pretends to go to the kitchen, fighting her curiosity for all of 30 seconds before she's racing up the stairs, flipping open the binder on her pre-assembled Ikea desk and turning to the last page.

It's a newspaper clipping for one of her games, just like hundreds of others in the book. But it’s not yellowed yet, not worn or delicate like the older mementos. There's a pink post-it on the page, and her throat closes up when she recognizes the handwriting: “Last game of Ginny’s MLB rookie season.”

She flips backwards through the book, watching her rookie year flash by in reverse rapid fire as she realizes. She's bolting down the stairs before she hits the minors, flinging the front door open before she even realizes what she's doing.

Mike’s car is still there, parked right in front of her mailbox. She's surprised to find that she expected it to be. The only thing she’s not sure of -- Ginny realizes, as she takes purposeful strides towards him -- is what to do next.

Something changes inside her when her bare feet pad across the smooth stones that lead to her driveway, when she's close enough to meet his eyes as he steps out of the car. This is her house, and there's a man waiting for her, and the thrilling novelty of both of those things has her ready to make what might be a very bad decision in a very big way.  And then, all of a sudden, she's right in front of him.

“My mother...” He smiles at her, sweetly, _because he knows_ , Ginny realizes. “Thank you, for that.”

“Not a problem.” This time, the smile almost turns into a smirk, and she doesn’t mind it. But she's too knotted up inside to find something clever, and then she's just staring, stuck between the things she wants to say and the things she wants to do.

“We gonna go through this again?” Mike finally wonders aloud. “Standing here in front of each other when there's a car I should be getting into?”

She's a little stunned by the boldness of his callback, but her feet take another step closer and her tongue offers up the response like she's had it planned this whole time. “No. Because we’re really gonna do it this time.”

 _Sometimes you have to be selfish_ , that's what he'd said.

“Yeah?” A full, brilliant smile suddenly stretches across Mike’s face and Ginny wonders if he even tried to stop it. “I gotta admit, rook, glad as I am to still be a Padre, I've found myself wondering what might have happened if Oscar had called just like, five minutes later.”

“Soon as you're done waxing poetic on it, old man.” She takes another step forward and a deep breath, because between his admission and her adrenaline, she can practically hear her heart thudding in her ears. “Kind of need your lips for this next part.”

He does stop, pausing and watching her with wide eyes, as if to show her he's ready, and Ginny has a split second of panic laced with deja vu. She's so close to him now, so close she can feel the warm of his chest and smell a hint of hops on his breath, and he’s leaning in, waiting for her to meet him halfway. It’s just the two of them, without a ticking clock, the possibilities are infinite until...

Ginny thinks about consequences, about their teammates, about the odds that one of her neighbors is going to put this on Snapchat -- then she remembers Mike’s phone buzzing in his pocket outside Boardner's, breaking the moment they could have had. It's all the motivation she needs to close the distance and press her lips to his.

His reaction is immediate, deepening the kiss until she can feel it in her knees. He tugs her close but not too tight, aware of her arm awkwardly pinned between them as his hands wrap around her waist and squeeze, fingers pressing in like there’s something he’s trying to keep. She loses herself in it, anchoring her free arm around his broad shoulders and letting her heart take over for the first time in over a decade.

They pull back but not away after a long moment, foreheads pressed against one another, taking in oxygen and each other.

“I'm glad you didn't go,” Ginny admits breathlessly, hoping he can hear the unspoken desire laced through her confession.

“Me too,” Mike whispers back, before capturing her lips again. “But I'm sorry I didn't get to kiss you like I was leaving.”

She wonders what the difference is, until the slow drag of his mouth against hers, the tease of his tongue against her lower lip, spells it all out.

There will be consequences, she's sure of it. But not yet. Not tonight. For now, there's just the sound he makes when her fingers tangle in the hair at the nape of his neck, the prickle of his beard surrounding the softness of his lips, and the feeling that she's finally home.


End file.
